Kyoto's Voodoo Economics
December 21, 1997
By Henry Payne
Copyright 1997 Scripps Howard News Service

Washington, DC - "Americans will pay the same or less for health-care coverage that will be the same or better than the coverage they have (today). That is the central reality," declared President Clinton in 1993 as he unveiled the cornerstone of his first term, the redesign of American health care.

"A fantasy," responded Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, D-N.Y., whose colleagues agreed.

This month the president announced the cornerstone of his second term, an international climate treaty to head off global warming. Like health care, the proposal was accompanied by voodoo economics. "If we do it right," he declared, "protecting the climate will yield not costs but profits, not burdens but benefits, not sacrifice but a higher standard of living."

Once again, the president is talking fantasy.

Celebrating the Kyoto treaty signing, Vice President Gore proudly announced that the United States would slash its greenhouse gas emissions by 2012 to 7 percent below 1990 levels in order to prevent what Gore sees as an "environmental holocaust."

Just 7 percent below 1990 levels. Simple, right?

What Gore left unsaid is that the Clinton administration has already quietly reneged on its 1993 commitment to reduce carbon dioxide emissions to 1990 levels by 2000. Since 1990, U.S. emissions have increased nearly 10 percent.

The obstacle is economic growth. As the economy booms, emissions rise. In modern times, according to the Department of Energy, CO2 emissions have dropped only twice _ during the recessions of 1981-82 and 1990-91. The 1981-82 recession, the deepest since the Great Depression, reduced CO2 emissions by 8 percent.

The DOE projects that the United States would have to chop its CO2 emissions by a whopping 41 percent from projected levels over the next 15 years to comply with the Kyoto treaty. The effect would be severe economic dislocation _ some economists think the coal industry would have to be shut down, for example _ and key senators are already declaring the treaty dead on arrival.

Treaty advocates like Gore claim that cutting CO2 will bring an economic boom driven by new, clean technologies. But those technologies have not been tried because they are substantially more expensive than existing energy sources.

Environmentalists applaud Europe's recent reduction of CO2 emissions as evidence that industrial nations can meet Kyoto's goals. But an important factor has been France's near-total conversion to nuclear power.

The nuclear alternative no longer exists in the United States, thanks to many of the same forces behind the Kyoto treaty. After the incident at Three-Mile Island in 1979, a campaign of environmentalist demagoguery and sensationalist news coverage all but destroyed the U.S. industry, and just this spring Clinton's Nuclear Regulatory Commission withheld approval of the first nuclear facility proposed since 1979, a fuel processing plant in Louisiana.

Worse than Gore's myths about alternative energy sources is his disengenuousness about how to combat global warming. Gore's closest scientific advisers tell him that Kyoto's emissions reduction goals _ though severe _ are not nearly severe enough. The Kyoto treaty achieves the worst of two worlds: It demands substantial economic sacrifice but will do nothing to solve the problem of global warming.
David Rind, a NASA atmospheric scientist and a key Gore science adviser, says that CO2 emissions must be cut 50 percent _ not 7 percent _ below 1990 levels to prevent the climate catastrophe that he and Gore foresee.

But the treaty's biggest flaw is that it sets out to solve a problem that may not exist.

Rind admits that 20 years ago, the prevailing view of disastrous global cooling, a doomsday scenario embraced then with the same fervor as global warming now, was "flat wrong." The floods, famines and storms that were supposed to occur this decade from global cooling have not happened.

Richard Lindzen, an atmospheric scientist at MIT and one of climatology's most respected experts, says that what we know of physics _ and what we don't know about climate variability _ does not support the alarmist predictions of global warming. In fact, even as more politicians embrace the global warming theory, more scientists are growing wary of it. Global warming climate models do not match observed climate fluctuations, and many scientists are turning to solar cycles as a more accurate predictor of global weather.

Though hailed as "historic" by environmentalists, Kyoto's outline for an international organization dictating national emission standards raises serious practical problems.

Getting our 50 states to agree on and abide by pollution laws is difficult and controversial enough. Imagine 159 independent and economically competitive nations obeying an international regulatory body! If Ohio and New York cannot agree on the effect of Midwest industrial emissions on Northeast air quality, how can the United States and China ever come to terms on CO2 emission cuts? Assume the the United States does not meet its emission goals in 2012, what international tribunal would dare punish it? And what would the American electorate do if the tribunal tried?

Already, Kyoto has aggravated the enormous divisions between the developed and developing nations on the question of economic growth.

Against U.S. interests, Gore's team agreed to a treaty that does not include the developing nations in emissions cuts. These nations already enjoy the advantage of cheaper labor. Free of the emissions cuts, these nations could also enjoy the advantage of cheaper energy as well. Gail McDonald, a spokeswoman for the Global Climate Coalition, an industry-labor group, argues that high-energy, high-emissions industries like aluminum and steel might move south to Central and South America, taking thousands of jobs with them.

The Kyoto summit had less to do with science than with the rise of the environmental movement in rich nations. Once an effort to clean up the excesses of industrialization, environmentalism has spawned a modern political movement dedicated to remaking society and redistributing wealth.

Environmentalists had little political clout in the mid-1970s when they lobbied to have the polar ice caps covered with heat-absorbing soot as a way of curbing global cooling. Today, the environmental movement is a well-funded, political powerhouse. One of its own, Vice President Gore, is in the White House, green parties are a growing influence in Europe, and fervent disciples populate America's newsrooms.

The bottom line of the Kyoto treaty is that its goals are unrealistic and insufficient to stabilize CO2 emissions on a planet that will add at least 2 billion more consumers in the next 50 years. The Kyoto treaty is not a solution to global warming, but a Trojan horse for environmentalists to phase out fossil fuels and achieve a transition to a post-industrial world in which governments dictate what we can and cannot consume.